TOI Puff-Piece on the Intelligence Bureau

Those in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) responsible for the 21 June Times of India puff piece should be quietly put out to pasture and the article's anonymous author should be selling classified ads; they are an embarrassment to their respective trades.

It is the job of the IB to keep its internal affairs hidden from view, not advertise details such as its current strength, recruitment patterns and training methods.

From the journalist’s perspective, the IB as currently constituted is a cancer on Indian democracy; even if it had a constitutional framework and was accountable to parliament and judiciary it would require close and continuous scrutiny.

Quite apart from these fundamental criticisms, the piece is misleading and muddle-headed.

The IB was not “established in 1887 to keep an eye on Russian troops” threatening India. It was part of the apparatus of oppression the British built from the times of the East India Company, a genesis that explains why the agency has been traditionally clueless about how to collect and analyse foreign intelligence.

Its traditional modus operandi of entrapment and torture was somewhat modernized after Madanlal Dhingra murdered India Office functionary Curzon Wyllie in London in 1909; but the new MI 5 and MI 6 continued to be focused mainly on Indian affairs.

In London, the police found that Dhingra’s hostel, India House, was a hive of revolutionary activity where Vinayak Damodar Savarkar held sway and visitors included Irish, German and Russian activists (including Lenin).

Within a year they had Savarkar in custody and shipped him off to exile in the Andamans, where they broke him with torture and used him to create the Hindutva brand in Indian politics.

In India, spymaster John Arnold-Wallinger at the Indian political intelligence office took charge of the service that would make a hit-man of the young Lieutenant Hastings Lionel Ismay, the man who as Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff would plot Partition and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. (Before coming out with Mountbatten, he was Secretary of the War Cabinet under Churchill, with whom he arranged for the demise of Franklin Roosevelt and launch of the Cold War.)

That is the tap root of independent India’s Intelligence Bureau.

After independence there was no effort to reorient the service politically and its leaders continued to have close relations with their former British supervisors.

Their primary function continued to be domestic political intelligence, focused not on threats to the State but on the interests of the Delhi sarkar.

Given that background, one would expect a high level of guile and skill in IB operatives, but those I came across in my six years in India seemed to have neither.

Initially they seemed fixated on the idea that I was a spy using high-tech American broadcast equipment, which they evidently thought was hidden in my bicycle (the cheapest Hero bought from the nearest bike shop)/umbrella/shoes/dark glasses/cap/keys.

The bicycle seemed to hold pride of place in their imagination.

Within a week of buying it the bicycle's glossy black paint had tiny scrapes all over, and its wire carrier basket had a piece removed.

At one point a guy decked out like Gunga Din came up and asked why the bicycle was called The Ranger. Several others asked about the Re.100 light fixed to the handlebar.

When they found nothing, interest did not flag. Attention turned to flattening my tires. I could never tell whether that was just to inconvenience me or to reduce what they imagined was my information gathering circuits through the streets of Pondicherry and Goa.

Within a year both tires looked as if they had crossed the Kalahari. One burst with a loud pop on a smooth street. The other herniated its inner tube and had to be replaced. 

IB examinations of my shoes sometimes had dramatic results. A pair of virtually indestructible Woodlands had the soles cut away and reattached with glue; they fell away from my feet in Pondicherry market, luckily near a pavement vendor of sandals.

The IB went to great lengths to prevent me assembling a spy network. My phone regularly flashed a sign warning of “Active incoming call diverts.” When I tried to call people, I would get a variety of strange messages, including “Call not permitted.”

People with whom I had instant rapport at first meeting would avoid further contact; I took that to be a sign they had been warned away. My closest relatives were called upon to inform on me: one admitted to it rather shame faced. In Goa, a “Blogger’s Group” became so obvious an IB stalking horse, I wondered if it had any genuine members.

The efforts at surveillance were occasionally amusing. One sleuth was disguised as an incredibly cruddy-looking “homeless man” who I felt sorry for and gave to generously until I noticed that instead of a bad smell he exuded aftershave. The owner of a kirana store near his hangout smirked when I asked what he thought of the man. “Sarkar ka admi” he said. Another watcher was a beggar woman with child. Shortly after I gave her some food, she was in line behind me at a ritzy pastry shop.

All this would be funny if not for the fact that I could never tell when IB Jekyll would switch to IB Hyde. There was no predicting when I would find myself bleeding on the pavement knocked down by a motorcycle or hospitalized by a near fatal asthma attack.  

My experience must be interpreted in one of two ways: either the IB is too dense to see the integrity of my personal and intellectual character, or else its leaders are themselves not true to their salt.

I don’t think the IB brass are dumb. 

As I found in selling my tax-free bonds before exiting India, they are corrupt.

I don't think there is any way to reform this monster. 

Of the Intelligence Bureau, HDFC and Bond Trading

The last month has broken my resolve to spend the rest of my life in India.

With my 70th birthday due in November, I must face the fact that it is futile to hope for an end to the incomprehensible oppressions some element of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) has directed at me over the last five years. In fact, it is getting worse and more blatant.

In the new apartment I moved to after the asthma episode, my usually robust health feels under constant insidious assault. Watching television with my feet up on the tea table, I see an unexpected drama, the bone of my left toe rising as if in response to blunt trauma. It hurts badly for a week, dully still; all my joints have unfamiliar aches; strange bells ring in m y ears. (Anyone considering reforms of the IB should ensure multi-key/off-site authorization for the use of aggressive technologies like weaponized ultrasound and directed radiation.)

The bulging toe removes any remaining doubts. Those who mean me ill are beyond reason, law and conscience. I must move.

As if to reinforce my determination, a small news item in The Indian Express tells of a new book by one of the men arrested and held for some seven years because the IB said they were terrorists. The trial resulted in all charges being dropped. The book tells of torture, as bad as anything you read about in Iraq under Anglo-American occupation. The torturers named in the book are all walking around free; they claim to know nothing of the allegations.

None of the half dozen other newspapers I read regularly has even a small story on the book.

In that scale of atrocity it is futile to hope that my pitiful blog posts about my small miseries will draw redress or bring any change.

Time to go, I tell myself and set about getting my finances together for the move. There’s not much to do, just sell three blocks of tax free government bonds and unfreeze another two of fixed deposits.

The bonds are in “demat” form, sold to me by HDFC Securities with the strong assurance that they can be readily sold online. The online trading platform informs me the bonds are selling at a nice premium but when I press the “Sell” button nothing happens.

So I head over to the HDFC Securities office behind Caculo Mall, a short bicycle ride away. There an official checks my account and says the bonds can be sold and puts me in touch by phone with a trader; he tells me it will take two days to sell them.

Why?

The bonds have to be “moved” to the branch.

It turns out later he said they had to be “mapped” to the branch, as meaningless a term to me as “moved,” for “demat” bonds exist only in cyberspace.

“I will call you,” he says. Two days later, not hearing from him I initiate the call.

It turns out that in the two days he spent “mapping” my bonds, their value has slid dramatically. Why? The equity markets have dropped over 600 points. That, he says, has affected the bond prices.

Some odd things happen along the way to getting my money.

It is the trader himself who calls to confirm the trades.

I get a text message: “As per SEBI norms NSE will start sending SMS/Email alert to you about transactions in your account. If SMS is wrongly sent to you reply by typing Y to 561614.”

The message is ostensibly from NSE, the National Stock Exchange.

I get not a single communication from NSE or any other authority. The HDFC trader/self confirmer is the only one I hear from.

As my phone informs me regularly that “active call divert” is in effect, it is possible any NSE message was blocked or went to the people manipulating my bond trades. Any NSE email alerts probably suffered the same fate.

I put down most of this in a letter to the HDFC branch manager and fill her in on the IB's dislike of contrarian journalists. She promises to reply in writing and forwards my letter to HDFC Securities to get their input.

The man from HDFC Securities calls me and says the two day delay to “map” the bonds is normal because I had bought them from the branch.

I tell him they were bought from his own agent. “Ah, it is normal to have the delay because it was your first trade,” he says. He does not mention the odd trader/confirmer arrangement or the peculiar SMS from the NSE.

Yesterday, at the branch manager’s office I ask about the promised written response to my complaint. “Oh I but I thought it was resolved,” she says, referring to my conversation with the HDFC Securities man. I say nothing was resolved; we merely stated our different positions.

While all this is happening, I am engaged in a parallel effort to register my change of address with the bank. The relationship manager asks for a recent electricity bill, a copy of the lease, and my ID proof. She asks specifically about my PAN card.

“I’ve lost my PAN card,” I say.

She says the lease and utility bill of the landlord should do. I take them in and everything seems to be in order, but then it turns out it is not. The flat is new, and the electricity bill is still in the name of the builder. She asks again for my ID proof and this time I have my passport with me.

“I also found a copy of my PAN card,” I say, giving her a printout from a scan I had on my computer. For some reason, she takes that and not my passport.

By way of further excitement I get a call in the evening from the clerk at the foreign exchange counter who was supposed to have sent my money to the UN Federal Credit Union in NY.

She cannot put it through because the UNFCU does not have a SWIFT code, only an ABA routing number.

Seems odd, for I have sent funds into my account from different countries and that has never been a problem. I am to go to the bank again this morning to try and resolve the matter.

Will keep posting as matters develop, for I think there is going to be many a slip between now and when I board the plane for New York.

In fact as I write this, my Samsung laptop has begun to exhibit the keyboasrd problems that have made my Sony Viao all but unusable. Perhaps I will have to do the rest of my writing about this process from an IB monitored Cyber Café.

How like Eastern Europe in the Cold War India has become!

Of IB and the Press

First a clarification. In my post on Back to Creepy Crawly Time I might have unwittingly implicated Ramu, who makes the wheels go round at Kamath Royale. I want to make clear I did not see him that morning. The worthy who almost fell of his bike when he saw me staggering off to Manipal Hospital is the person who lounges around Building 6.

Thinking of what has happened over the last few days brought to mind that a friend and fellow journalist, Appan Menon, was not as lucky as I was: he expired under very similar circumstances in 1996.

[Readers will excuse me for taking this opportunity to record fondly that I first met Appan when we were both about eight or nine, when his father dropped him off at our house in Calcutta to be sent on to school in Darjeeling while he himself went on to a UN job in Bangkok.I was immediately impressed with his sophistication, on exhibit in the rendition of "Whiskey, brandy, gin and rum! I want a lady with a big fat bum!" I mentioned that to his wife when I met her at the UN; she grinned, "He's still singing it."]

Another journalist who died in mysterious conditions was Jyotirmoy Dey, the Crime Reporter for the Mumbai tabloid Mid Day. In June 2011 he was shot dead gangland style on the street in front of his residence. He had just returned from a meeting in London with a source who, rumour has it, provided information on 26/11. Given the allegations of an IB role in 26/11, it is legitimate to wonder about the gunmen's motives.

Also in 2011, J. Sri Raman (whose consistent failure to present an Indian perspective on international issues made me want to throw things), died suddenly of "multiple organ failure.

I mention their deaths because the Intelligence Bureau's undeniable fingerprints on my brush with the hereafter -- which would never have been suspected if the outcome had been different -- makes me wonder about its broader attitude toward journalists.

I am quite sure the consistent pressure I have felt over the last five years is not because of any set IB policy; at the same time, it cannot be from a Brownian movement of idiots within the staff.

I think it reflects an  inherently unsympathetic attitude towards journalists. As indicated by the various attempts to entrap me in situations that would have seriously impeached my integrity, there also seems to be a profound misreading of what an intelligence agency can legitimately do in a democracy. My experience has made me wonder about the legitimacy of the charge of rape against Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal.

Does the government do anything to teach our domestic spooks the importance of protecting the basic human rights of Indian citizens?

Is there any sensitivity training about the need not to bully our citizenry into unethical conduct? (I am here thinking of the poor waiters compelled to add extra salt to my dishes or serve up half servings.)  In a country recovering from several generations of oppressive foreign rule it is critically important to protect every individual's sense of integrity.

Do the agency's leaders seek to build a culture supportive of the idea of Press Freedom? It might be convenient for them to have controllable journalists but do they consider the harm done in the process? A Press without undue constraints on its work is of enormous value, not least in collecting and analysing information that should be a staple of all intelligence activity.

The UNESCO declaration that a free Press is the touchstone of all other freedoms is the literal truth and it merits institutional attention from the IB.

Creepy Crawly: Some Afterthoughts

In re-reading yesterday's post I see some important details are missing.

• The ants who nested inside my Samsung laptop must have been extremely smart and technically proficient. They unscrewed a sealed compartment and (going by what the service center technician in Pondy said), replaced two standard black screws with white ones.

• The neighbor who I called for help when having the asthma attack says he was awake at the time. His phone neither rang nor has a missed call record.

• I forgot entirely about the Intelligence Bureau's successful effort to prevent me from a bid to show my paintings at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. See here.

• I just spent a night at the Goa International Center of which I am a life member. The room had the latest membership directory, and lo, I had disappeared from it. Don't think it is an oversight. Why would the IB do that? For the same reason it has me in a virtual North Korea in India: to make me a non-person. 

Also wanted to share a thought about why the IB continues to harass me: they probably think my awareness of their attempts at surveillance and manipulation must mean I have superior foreign technology and hence I must not be what I seem.

It is perhaps useless to address paranoia or corruption with reasoned explanation, but let me try.

The technology that allows me to know what the IB is doing to me and around me is entirely indigenous.

It is much celebrated in the long history of Indian tradition as spiritual awareness.

Back to Creepy Crawly Time!

Just when I think the nut cases at the Intelligence Bureau have gone off my case they come roaring back.

In early April I woke up coughing one morning and the puff at the inhaler, which is usually good for my mild asthma, had no effect.

It got worse very rapidly, and feeling that I needed help, I tried calling a neighbor. It was before seven in the morning and there was no reply.

Next I tried calling a taxi. I have three on my mobile phone.

The first two did not pick up. The third did. "Manoj, I need to get to Manipal Hospital" I croaked. He knows who I am and where I live.

There was a slight pause. Then another voice came on. "Wrong number" it said.

By then I was in deep distress and passed out. How long I was out I don't know, perhaps a few minutes. But eventually I regained consciousness. As I was heading for the compound gate the resident IB spook was coming in on his bike. He was visibly surprised to see me.

That was only the most dramatic of recent incidents.

Another was when I went to a musical concert and at intermission, left a tiny package of pills on the seat to show it was taken. When I got back, the taped brown-paper package had been ripped open and one of the pills pushed out from its blister pack.

What exactly they're looking for or have against me is impossible to say. It can't be just that I keep writing that the IB is completely out of control and needs to be brought under constitutional controls.

In fact, it reminds me of the first time I went to Nepal. It was the sixties, and I went overland along what was then called the "hippie trail."

From the train-head on the Indian side you had to take a cycle rickshaw through a magical stretch of gloomy forest.

There was no one on the Indian side of the border. On the Nepali side a lone sentry inspected my backpack.

I did not notice the time because it was so pleasant, but eventually, the impatience of the rickshawwallah got through to me.

The sentry was carefully going through my underwear and socks.

"What are you looking for?" I asked amiably.

"I don't know sir," he replied

It seems to me that is the predicament of all intelligence agencies. They have to be suspicious with no idea what to look for.

What makes the IB particularly interesting is the belief of some of its staff that they need to control what journalists write. And that those who they cannot control must be harassed.

I have written about this off and on over the last few years, but rather than give links to old posts, perhaps it's time to offer a summary.

The first time surveillance turned to harassment it turned my face black, as if I was undergoing radiation treatment.

That was followed by two "accidents" in Pondicherry. On both occasions, motorcyclists ran into my bicycle. Neither so much as tapped his horn (a certain indication of mala fide in India).

One ran into me frontally and knocked me to the pavement. The shopkeeper there helped me up and wiped the blood from a cut to the forehead. The guy who ran into me, a rather hefty police type, took off.

The second incident occurred on a clear day on an uncrowded road: another police type ran into me from the back and sent me sailing a good six feet. No blood but I felt the jarring in my 66-year old bones for a fortnight.

Other harassment took the form of warning people that I was a spy. At a meeting of the Progressive Writers Group, the speaker, thinking I was asleep, remarked "Ah, the spy has gone to sleep!" (and had the grace to look embarrassed when I opened one eye to let him know I had heard.)

In 2011, I brought back a Sony laptop from New York. It became totally dysfunctional in short order. The local service center proved entirely, even arrogantly unhelpful. It comes back to life occasionally, I guess when someone at IB is feeling magnanimous. Last week I could use it to surf the web. Today I can't get it to boot.

Forgot to mention that a Samsung I bought in Mumbai in 2008 also became dysfunctional, but the guy at the service center found the problem: ants nesting inside. They ate up some vital ingredient and now it too will not turn on.  

Back in Goa, my cleaning lady came in one morning and asked me to get her a sim card. As it is illegal in India to get someone else a mobile phone connection, I declined. She refused my offer to accompany her to the shop and stand guarantor. That evening there were bomb blasts in Hyderabad, and I realized that I might have escaped entrapment very narrowly.

I wanted to go to the World Social Forum in Tunis and my attempt to get a visa set off all kinds of unexpected repercussions. Here I must resort to a link, for the story is too complex to summarize.

After I wrote about what had happened, a reader suggested that I complain to the Home Ministry. The Ministry passed the buck to the Home Secretary in Goa, who evidently initiated a police inquiry.

I got a call from the Dona Paula Police Station and went there to make a statement. In the course of my narration I mentioned the Hyderabad blasts.

Whether my statement was an FIR or not, it obviously must have put someone's nose seriously out of joint, for the harassment became intense.

There was urine in my microwave oven. (I forgot to mention, they seem to have full access to my apartment.) There was human excreta on an inside page of one of my newspapers.

The food I ordered from restaurants invariably came spilled loose inside their plastic bags. Dry food came liberally laced with grit. If I went myself to get the food, an IB flunky would -- with a very in your face attitude -- appear beside me at the counter and get anywhere from a third to a half of what I had ordered.

When this was at its height, I emailed the Governor of Goa, who I had met at an art gallery opening, suggesting we collaborate on a book about Indian intelligence. (He was the former head of RAW.) He declined, but it stopped the harassment: whoever was responsible was obviously reading my email.

I also tried to get a lawyer to file suit against the IB but had no luck finding one to take the case. (By the way, according to reports, none of India's intelligence agencies responds to RTI requests although they are supposed to do so in cases of infringement of human rights.)

In the period that followed there were successive efforts at entrapment.

At a musical evening at Taleigao Church a pimply teenager sat leaning into me. The man next to her whispered "Are you doing it?" Whatever it was she was supposed to do, I did not wait to find out.

At a film showing the man in the next seat was reaching for my crotch and I was getting ready to clock him when he suddenly sprang from his seat and literally ran up the aisle. (Did someone monitoring my responses tell him to run for it?)

On an evening visit to the Magsons supermarket at Caculo Mall as I was passing through a dim stretch of street a little kid leaped on the back of my bicycle; if I hadn't let out an inadvertent yell that scared him off, it might have turned nasty. (The papers then were full of rapes and assaults on kids.)

A continuing element of the IB activity is the interception of my incoming telephone calls. Because of that, it is impossible for anyone to reach me. Most calls I make go through two stages. In the first, a "No network coverage" or other service denial message flashes on my phone. In the second, if the call is deemed allowable, it goes through; otherwise it beeps off.

What leads me to write this lengthy resume of my interactions with the Intelligence Bureau is what I've just gone through with a real estate broker. Perhaps the tale is best told by the letter I emailed her yesterday.

Dear M------,

Given the possibility of fraud because of the non-return of my HDFC cheque number xxxxx I am putting on record the circumstances in which I wrote it.

You asked me for a cheque of Rs.23,000/- as earnest of intent in negotiating the rental of an apartment at Kamat Royale, Caranzalem owned by Mr.xxxxx xxxxx, also resident in the same compound.

When I received the draft agreement from the owner I realized that it would be impossible to have him for a landlord and told you I was not interested in pursuing the matter.

That was in the second week of April.

When I queried you about not receiving the cheque back you told me Mr. xxxxx had cashed it. Upon checking with my bank I found out it had not been cashed and put a stop payment block on it.

Since then I have repeatedly asked for the return of the cheque and you have told me that Mr. xxxxx was travelling and out of reach.

Yesterday (30 April), when I was told that again, I asked for his phone number so I could clarify his intentions. You agreed to give me the number but then the line was disconnected.

Following that, I sent a phone text message putting the matter on record.

This email message is for the same purpose, only in more detail."

What is behind this situation is anyone's guess, but the fact that I have felt the need to write the letter to protect myself in the event of an elaborate IB fraud speaks volumes. 

It is legitimate to wonder how much it has cost the Indian taxpayer for the IB to play its paranoid little Spy games with a journalist too brash to be good at any kind of deception.

Will they ever get tired? Or will someone ever tell them to stop?
 
 .      

TOI Buries Eye-Popping Story on Intel Bureau

On 12 April The Times of India buried on page 8 an eye-popping story on the Intelligence Bureau that casts an entirely new light on the surveillance of Netaji’s kin.

Written by V. Balachandran, a former Special Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, the story tells how the IB continued after independence to work closely with the Brits.

“Declassified British archives speak of a loud disconnect between the Nehru government’s strategic policies and the priorities pursued by the IB,” Balachandran writes.

India’s warming relations with the Soviet Union and its cooling ties with Britain following the 1956 Suez Crisis did not affect IB-MI-5 cooperation a whit.

In fact, IB shared intel on Soviet leaders with the Brits, and even gave them information on Moscow's funding of Indian communists.

The IB Director at that time wrote to his British counterpart that “In my talks and discussions I never felt that I was dealing with any organization which was not my own.”

That sentiment seems to have been shared by others who led IB.

Its first Director shared a dislike of V.K Krishna Menon with the head of MI-5, who assured his own government “we are doing what we could to get rid” of him.

To facilitate such close cooperation the British maintained a Security Liaison Officer (SLO) in New Delhi for over two decades after independence. When he was finally withdrawn in 1971, the IB Director wrote officially that he “did not know how [he] would manage without him.”

Balachandran notes MI-5’s official historian Christopher Andrew’s view that Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru “either never discovered how close the relationship was” between the two agencies “or less probably, did discover and took no action.”

That situation needs to be kept in mind, Balachandran says “before we jump to any conclusions that Jawaharlal Nehru had ordered IB snooping on Netaji Subhas Bose’s family members.” .

As a journalist genetically mistrustful of intelligence agencies I should add that it is also necessary to keep in mind the possibility that the British declassified the documents containing these revelations so as to divert attention from the damning evidence of Nehru's collaboration with them. In the final phase of the freedom struggle he was compromised by his liaison with Edwina Mountbatten into playing a deeply invidious role.

That is a matter for historians to ponder.

What is significantly more urgent is the need to ensure that the Intelligence Bureau is no longer attached to the MI-5 teat. 

There should be a judicial inquiry empowered to look into the entire record of the IB in independent India.

A special focus of the inquiry should be the allegations of IB complicity in the 26/11 attacks.

This would also be a good time to create a constitutional framework for our Intelligence agencies and draw them into a system of parliamentary oversight and accountability.

Without a strong and rigorously implemented set of standards and rules they could very well be the death of Indian democracy.

Caveat Emptor: Regular Customer

Since coming back to India after four decades abroad I've been consistently surprised by a particular element of the business ethic here: as a regular customer at an establishment I am almost always more likely to be swindled or inconsiderately treated.

This is not because of any rudeness or lack of consideration on my part, for I am invariably polite and bend over backward not to be demanding.

On the contrary, I think it is because I am that way; familiarity seems to breed contempt.

The latest example is a small Panjim hole in the wall (SRS Businesspoint), where I have been paying my monthly television and phone recharge bills.

A Rs500 payment on 2 March for television service was not credited and I found out when my set went dead on Sunday.

A Rs.200 payment on the 7th for the phone has yet to be credited.

No explanations, and calls to the service providers reveal there is no recourse.

I have stopped going to a bigger company, Magsons Supermarket, where I used to spend several thousand every week because for some inexplicable reason, some of the clerks became almost bellicose.

These are just two examples.

I am tempted to lay this phenomenon at the door of my bete noire, rogue members of the Intelligence Bureau, whose noses I have put out of joint with my calls for the agency to be brought under constitutional controls.

They have engaged in considerable petty -- and not so petty -- harassment in the past, but to make an accusation without any proof would be invidious.

P.S: The day after I wrote this post it occurred to me that my experience could reflect a non-economic behavior pattern: extortion by some policing authority.

Recently a couple of Goa plain clothes police officers were hauled up for extorting money from tourists, who they thought powerless to resist.

This points to a danger of abuse in our intelligence agencies requiring internal vigilance arrangements; the power to force cooperation in gathering information could easily be corrupted into extortion of benefits.

In Pakistan, the ISI has developed into a major economic player by using its powers of extortion, and the same could happen here.

If it does, we're in a completely different ball game, with the entire democratic system under threat.   

Our Intelligence Bureau as Art Censor

Notices in the Goa newspapers that the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai was accepting applications from artists for their 2015 exhibition season led me to take along a CD of my work (of which I provide a few samples below), on a trip to the city on 21 September.

The Gallery’s web site said that in addition to submitting the CDs in the month of September, artists should pay Re.200 for an application form: the selection committee would consider both in making its decisions in the next few weeks.

The web site was quite specific that the applications were for the 2015 season.

At the Gallery office a lady directed me to the adjacent Library room, saying the CD would have to be inspected before acceptance.

In the Library, a man peremptorily dismissed my submission because I was “not on the list.”

He further said that application forms were only available for the 2021 season.

When I referred to the Gallery’s published guidelines, his lip curled in contempt: “I don’t know what you saw.”

I could not appeal to higher authority, for the Secretary of the Gallery was away and would not be back until the 10th of October.

From experience I would say that this is yet another piece of work by rogue members of the Intelligence Bureau who seem to think I need to be punished for writing about the agency’s unconstitutional existence and complete lack of accountability.

The British designed and used the Intelligence Bureau as an instrument of oppression, and after independence our netas took no action to either cleanse it or bring it within some form of constitutionally accountable framework.

Worse, the politicians nominally in charge have pandered to its corruptions.

A corrupt media dependent on a stream of IB leaks to feed its hunger for scandals to expose have been disinclined to cover any of this.

The entirely predictable result has been the emergence of the Intelligence Bureau as a threat to our democratic system.

It should be the subject of judicial and parliamentary probes and a determined effort at reform helped by those within it committed to protecting civil rights and democratic values.

And now for something completely different:

 

Film Stars: Acrylic on Canvas 25X39 inches

 Whirligigs: Acrylic on paper 14X22 inches

 Kali Yuga: Acrylic on canvas 36X42 inches

 Mother India: Acrylic on canvas 36X49 inches

 God's Own Country  Acrylic on canvas 50X37 inches

Goa Days  Acrylic on paper 22X30 inches

The Reality of the Kali Yuga

The transmigration of individual souls, long derided as the most fantastic of Hindu beliefs, has in the last century been made irrefutable by the scientific discoveries of the matter-energy continuum and the genetic code. When a person dies the indestructible energy pattern of the body floats free and transports the unique soul to a new material form, much as a radio wave carries a human voice to a rightly tuned antenna around the world.

That leaves only one fundamental belief of Hinduism without a publicly argued rational explanation: the long four-stage moral cycle from a Golden Age of virtue to the dank corruption of the Kali Yuga.

This lack of argument should be seen as part of our general cultural amnesia, for our ancients never postulated anything without reason. Indeed, it does not require much analysis to reveal the rationale for the four yuga cycle.

The first phase, when virtue is “firmly founded on four feet,” harks back to the time when humanity was part of Nature and cultural behavior closely reflected the instinctive. Ideas of the “Noble Savage” and “primitive communism” reflect somewhat similar thinking in the West. This was the time when the Saptarishis, seeking peace among the many tribes of India, assembled all their sacred lore into the Vedas, thereby underlining large commonalities among the groups and creating a common object of veneration.

The second phase of reduced but still excellent virtue was the time of the Upanishads, when rishis in their forest abodes agreed on the existence of a Paramatma universally immanent as the Eternal Law (Sanathana Dharma). The idea that a firm and unbreakable chain of karmic causality controlled individual destiny countered the tyranny of the tribe and gradually reduced groups to vague caste identities associated with specialized functions in an interdependent society. 

As hunter gatherer tribes settled into agricultural existence a protective monarch became necessary; the Ramayana captured and promoted the ideal of that new political reality. The change caused a drop in virtue from the previous era because the concentration of political power and land ownership inevitably introduced a considerable measure of negotiation and thus guile into social relations.

The third era, the time of the Mahabharata, saw the lust for power explode into great imperial conflict. Sri Krishna, acknowledged as the only “purnaswaroop” of Vishnu’s incarnations, set right the growing imbalance of the age and, in the Bhagavad Gita, instructed the virtuous how to endure the Kali Yuga to come.

That final age of overweening corruption can be seen rationally as the shadow of material progress in the preceding Yugas.

The specialized division of labor and the freedom of individuals to make moral and economic choices – a combination that Adam Smith in 18th Century England would describe as the essential attributes of a wealth-creating free market – had made India an immensely rich country. Its luxurious products, ranging from spices that preserved food to fine cotton cloth and diamond jewelry, attracted traders from the far ends of Eurasia and further added to the country's fabled wealth.

As imperial power had corrupted older ideals of governance, so wealth and luxury undermined the spiritual value system founded on the teachings of the Upanishads. 

The tamasic qualities of greed, jealousy and anger unmoored “practical” men and women from the fine concern with the truth founded in concern for karmic consequences. As that phenomenon grew it led to a larger closing of the Indian mind, preventing the society from perceiving and responding to internal and external threats. The ineffectiveness of leadership resulted in things falling apart at the slightest challenge; every invader found Indian allies and collaborators.

Interestingly, India did not attract invaders just with its wealth; its religious concepts -- or rather, incomprehension of them -- were key factors stirring them into action.

Within India, the concept of a Universal Spirit was firmly anchored in the concepts of Dharma and Karma, both preventing any individual or group from setting rules on behalf of the Almighty. Those anchors were lost as monotheism made its way from India to the philosophy of Plato. and then into the first Greek translation of the Jewish Bible three centuries before the advent of Jesus.

Within the Jewish fold the loss of constraints on the concept of God had little negative effect because of the belief in Israel’s exclusive covenant with YAHWEH; but as the messianic faiths of Christianity and Islam advanced exclusive claims on God that delegitimized each other and all other religions, the result was unending conflict.

The economic and political fallout was heavy. As Islamic conquests around the Mediterranean cut off Christian Europe’s access to the Indian spice trade it inspired an ongoing search for alternate routes to India. Marco Polo skirted north of Muslim lands to China, and his book describing a return to Europe via India, gave Christopher Columbus the idea that another path to the Orient might lie across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, an old Phoenician legend recounted by Herodotus that Africa was an island led the Portuguese to explore a southward sea route. 

Six years after Columbus made landfall at Hispaniola, Vasco da Gama rounded the southern cape of Africa and a Gujarati pilot took him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. A later Portuguese expedition to India was blown far off course by a storm off the western coast of Africa and landed up in Brazil. Within a matter of decades Europeans moved from belief in a flat earth to circumnavigating the globe.

I have described in an earlier post the horrendous consequences of European expansion for the people of the newly discovered regions. In India the European intrusions were preceded by those of Arabs, Turks and Afghans occurring as it were, in slow motion over the period of a millennium. There was no concerted response even though Guru Nanak went throughout the country seeking to spark a renaissance. It took the mass murder and dire poverty inflicted by the British to bring his efforts to fruition four centuries later.

As the country now looks to a period of sustained economic growth it is well to remember that the path out of the Kali Yuga must be essentially spiritual and that enormous challenges face us. Our political elite is sodden with corruption, our policing authorities are wolves, the intellectual leaders who should be helping India recover its true self are in the pay of our most bitter enemies, and even some of the leaders of our fighting forces, men who should value honor above life itself, have sold their integrity for that most pitiable of rewards, money.

I firmly believe that our exit from the Kali Yuga is unstoppable. The power of the bhakti of the great mass of Indians – certainly the only thing that has kept the country on an even keel through the worst disasters – will ultimately cleanse the elite. However, there is no predicting the pace of change. It will depend entirely on the moral conduct of younger generations. If they are committed above all else to personal integrity and sacrifice in the service of the country India can recover itself swiftly. If not, we could linger for generations in the current bewildered and weakened state at the mercy of brutal foreign forces.

There are many signs those forces are strengthening. The latest is the announcement of an Indian chapter of Al Qaeda, which has from its inception been under British control. I take it as an indication that the British incubus is readying like some real life Voldemort to return from the realm of the undead.

As with the evil Lord of the Harry Potter stories, Britain has a range of allies awaiting the return, from corporate leaders, media houses and poisonous advertising agencies to openly anti national A-list film stars and of course, the corrupt in every field with black money under British management.

Also, a slow coup d'etat seems to be gathering strength from within the civil service that runs everything from elections to our unconstitutional and out of control Intelligence Bureau. The death of a popular BJP politician in a car accident in Delhi, the fall that put another outspoken leader into a coma in Rajasthan, the attempt to tar the most active environmental activists in the country, and now the bid to bring the judiciary under bureaucratic control, are not incidental straws in the wind. .

They should put everyone on alert. In fact, everyone should be prepared for a 9/11 type attack that will justify declaration of an Emergency and suspension of civil rights and procedures.

Creepy Crawly Update

The visitor counter on my blog disappeared after I published the Midnight's Children review.

It has done so a number of times over the years, always in the wake of a post with a significant number of readers.

The disappearance of the counter led me to check what Webmaster Tools had to say about the health of the site. This is what I found:

• On 2 February 2012 the Google search engine had indexed 217 URLs on my site and none had been blocked by a robot.txt. (A robot.txt is used by the owner of a web site to block search engines from indexing outdated information.)

• On 9 September 2012, the number of indexed URLs on my site peaked at 774; since then it has dropped precipitously and now stands at 529. Webmaster Tools says such a drop indicates the site has been hacked.

• On 4 November 2012, the day I posted "The Implications of Scandalmania," the number of blocked URLs on my blog shot up from 0 to 516.

•  On 3 February 2013 (the latest data available), the number of indexed URLs was 529 and the number of blocked URLs stood at 594.

• On two occasions the site had returned "not found" error notices to the Google search bot.

• The number of other sites linked to the Undiplomatictimes blog has dropped from over 450 to 64.

• The "search" function on the blog has been disabled, so readers cannot find an old item by typing in a keyword. 

These developments mean that some technically competent entity -- institutional or individual -- wants to minimize the number of readers I have.

Heading my suspect list are the rich and powerful people who run India's anti-national "elite" media.  They have the motive and the means to hack and censor.

It is also possible that the nebulous Thought Police who had me in their sights in New York have followed me to India.

The TP were a constant presence in my life during the decades I spent covering the United Nations. In the post 9/11 period, they put bugs in my phones and car, and just so I would know, occasionally brought them noisily alive with police chatter or racist hate radio. They would also routinely delay invitations to prevent my attendance at receptions and other events that would be news-gathering opportunities.
 

[Ironically, the TP also arranged widespread photocopying of my copyrighted $200-a-year newsletter to supply copies to UN insiders and deny me critically needed funds. On one occasion, alerted by a UN staff-member who had been told to photocopy my weekly output for distribution to top brass, I complained to the Secretary-General's Spokesman. That led to a meeting with an official of the UN Legal Office who threatened to take away my Press credentials if I pressed the matter. I wrote to the Secretary-General asking if he supported that threat and elicited an offer to settle. After doing some research I submitted an estimate of 135 pirated copies over several years. It led to nothing. A New York lawyer I consulted told me not to bother pursuing the matter, as the UN was notorious for copyright violation and could not be brought to book because it was immune from prosecution.]  

In earlier Creepy Crawly posts from Pondicherry I have noted the activities of the TP after my return to India. (See here and here.) Since then, the intimidating surveillance seems to have stopped, at least for now.

In Goa the surveillance continues but I get the feeling it is benign and maybe even protective. Perhaps someone in the Intelligence Bureau has found time to actually read my blog.

PS: All this should perhaps be seen as a continuation of the theme of the previous post on how the British dominate the global narrative.